Slap in the Facebook: It’s Time for Social Networks to Open Up

Damn the Facebooks and the MySpaces. The last time we checked, there was this thing called the internet that had 6 billion users. It's time to take our personal data out of Mr. McGregor's little gardens and put it back where it belongs — free and open on the open web.

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Social networks like Facebook and MySpace are taking the web by storm because they make it easy to manage your personal data and keep in touch with people you know. But to get value out, you have to put something in — photos, contacts, appointments, lists of your interests and your blog musings.

How To Wiki

Therein lies the rub. When entering data into Facebook, you're sending it on a one-way trip. Want to show somebody a video or a picture you posted to your profile? Unless they also have an account, they can't see it. Your pictures, videos and everything else is stranded in a walled garden, cut off from the rest of the web.

Like locked cell phones and copy-protected music, Facebook is on the wrong side of the open-network debate. Facebook is a sealed bubble. Facebook users are locked into Facebook, just as iTunes locks music fans to Apple's iPod.

This serves companies' business interests, but not the wider interests of consumers. AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft have their own, proprietary instant-messaging systems. They're all good, but they'd be better if they worked together. The iPhone would be better if it could also be used on Verizon's and Sprint's networks, and Facebook would be better if you could link to friends' pages on MySpace and Bebo. Social networking should be based on open standards, just like e-mail.

Some social networking companies are starting to build open platforms that allow your personal data to be exported and put to use anywhere you like.

On Monday, the contact management service Plaxo will launch a new social network called Pulse. Offering a customizable profile page, the service will allow Plaxo subscribers to manage their interpersonal relationships and show off their interests.

In many ways, Pulse will offer the same all-your-data-in-one-place approach as Facebook, but with one crucial difference: It's not walled off. Anything put into Plaxo can be retrieved and used elsewhere, and any data made public will be accessible across the wider internet: Viewers will not need a Plaxo account. The service will be rather limited initially, but it's a step in the right direction.

However, Pulse is no panacea. What the internet needs is a way to take the features of the popular social networks and make them available to the world at large.

For the last couple of weeks, Wired News tried to roll its own Facebook using free web tools and widgets.

We came close, but we ultimately failed. We were able to recreate maybe 90 percent of Facebook's functionality, but not the most important part — a way to link people and declare the nature of the relationship.

Hey Kids, Let's Put On a Show

It's entirely possible to replicate most of the features of Facebook without getting sucked into its black hole, but the single most important element is missing.

At this point, "friend" relationships remain unique to the social networks. The web still lacks a generalized way to convey relationships between people's identities on the internet. The absence of this secret sauce — an underlying framework that connects "friends" and establishes trust relationships between peers — is what gave rise to social networks in the first place. While we've largely outgrown the limitations of closed platforms (take e-mail or the web itself), no one has stepped forward with an open solution to managing your friends on the internet at large.

We would like to place an open call to the web-programming community to solve this problem. We need a new framework based on open standards. Think of it as a structure that links individual sites and makes explicit social relationships, a way of defining micro social networks within the larger network of the web.

One possibility is the microformat XHTML Friends Network, or XFN, which defines relationships between linkers and linkees.

Trouble is, the data format doesn't yet offer any tools for managing friends. While a snippet of code placed in a web page can convey who you know — and how you know them — as yet there are no tools to put the information to good use, like automatically pulling in calendar events from of all your friends' websites.

Some developers are beginning to offer easy-to-use tools that can create XFN code (WordPress and Movable Type both offer blank templates that can be filled in), but use of XFN isn't yet widespread.

Such a "micronetwork" standard may sound daunting or even impossible, but nearly all the tools we've mentioned so far started small. Blogging grew from a few people trying to easily publish web content on a daily basis. Del.icio.us started with one person looking for a way to manage his bookmarks from any machine. Even Facebook started with a few college friends looking for a better way to plan their social lives.

Eventually, an open network will emerge. Let's make it happen sooner rather than later.

Make Your Own Facebook

With a little savvy, anyone can create a page that includes all of the fun stuff found in a Facebook profile.

Start by setting up a blog. Say what's on your mind. Unlike your blog on Facebook or MySpace, everyone will be able to read it.

All of these services have open APIs, making it easy for third-party developers to build widgets for displaying data stored there. As a result, many such tools exist.

Need to keep up-to-date with your friend's activities? Pull in a feed from their blog or from their Twitter account. The Upcoming group calendar service has a dead-simple code generator that will create a widget listing all the events you plan to attend, as well as those your friends are interested in.

Like to chat? Meebo offers an embeddable widget for instant messenger chatting, and jaxtr does the same for SMS. You can even drop in a Skype button that lets your friends call you with one click.

One of Facebook's best features is its comprehensive feeds that show what everybody's up to (called News Feeds and Mini-Feeds), but you can build such a thing yourself. Create an account with one of the many feed-mixing services like Yahoo's Pipes, FeedShake or FeedBlendr. Plug in all the feeds from the various sources you want to track and paste the resulting URL into a widget on your site. Voilà.

Need a site? The free blogging software from WordPress will let you embed these widgets and RSS streams. WordPress also has a thriving plug-in ecosystem, so it's likely a developer somewhere has done much of the dirty work for you.

An even easier option is to use a customizable homepage from Pageflakes or Protopage. Pageflakes in particular allows you to build a customized page that aggregates a lot of varied content just like Facebook, which you can then publish publicly (Pageflakes calls this a Pagecast). And beyond a simple user registration, Pageflakes doesn't lock in any of your personal data.

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